Circa 1956: Crabmeat Cocktail to kick off a feast that moves on to the Fish Florentines (bekti steak baked with cheese sauce and chopped spinach) and Chicken Sicillienes, and rounds off with a Cold Everest. Stanley Gomes serenading the lunch tables with his haunting violin solos and Pam Craine belting out a sizzling set to warm the dance floor at dinnertime?

Circa 2006: For starters, you can still mull over a Minestrone Italienne or a ‘house-favourite’ Mulligatawny Soup, before tucking into a portion of Fish a la Diana (bekti stuffed with prawn cooked in cream sauce) or a Chicken Chipolata. Only, the glass dance floor with coloured lights beneath has been done away with, and there’s no live band to entertain diners...

Interiors of Mocambo on Mirza Ghalib Street. Picture by Rashbehari Das

For 50 years, Mocambo on Free School Street (now Mirza Ghalib Street) has stuck to its original avatar, serving its “authentic Continental cuisine” to a satisfied clientele with considerable consistency, without ever having to seriously reinvent.

Quite a rarity in our times. “Yes, we have never felt the need to tamper with a successful formula that has worked for us for half a century,” says present owner Nitin Kothari. His father, the late Shivji V. Kothari, started the 110-cover eatery in the summer of 1956, as a “cosy, European-style” restaurant serving straight-ahead delicacies from the Continent.

“This was the first restaurant of its kind in India, with an Italian chef-manager (Prandhi), a German interior architect (Messerschmidt) and a six-piece live band (fronted by Anton Menezes) that played a heady mix of jazz, blues, pop and rock,” recalls Nitin.

At 59, he is hands-on at the helm, with son Siddharth on board as well, painstakingly guarding one of the last remaining old-world bastions in the Park Street area.

“True, there’s no dancing and live music anymore, but on the food front, absolutely nothing has changed, and we have taken extra care to retain the recipes as they were,” stresses Nitin.

The initial menu was designed by Prandhi himself, which explains the generous sprinkling of Italian dishes like Chicken Milanese and Chicken Tetrazzini (chicken fillet cooked with pasta and green peppers and mushrooms in a sherry sauce). The Latino master had meticulously trained Jerome Gomes as his understudy to help preserve the flair and flavour.

Gomes remained loyal to Mocambo all through and was retained way beyond the superannuating age of 58 by a grateful management. “I even provided him with a chair in the kitchen when he could no longer stand, and asked him to simply oversee operations,” remembers Nitin, also vice-president of the Hotel and Restaurant Association of Eastern India.

While Gomes started his own signature dish Fish a la Jerome, he also perfected such perennial favourites like Greek Drunken Prawns and Devilled Crab (crabmeat speciality in cheese and mustard sauce served in the shell from which it came). He even improvised a fiery variety of the dish, Pepper Crab Devilled.

The ambience was “extremely laid-back in those days, with the emphasis on a good dining experience, not just grabbing a bite”, and lunch would stretch on till four in the afternoon.

You could even bump into Uttam Kumar or Suchitra Sen, Sharmila Tagore and the ‘Tiger’ Pataudi, Amitabh Bachchan or Sanjeev Kumar ? enjoying a quiet Conti meal.

“We even parcelled food for Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi to be served on board their aircraft. Although Mocambo has been known for its Continental cuisine, we have always had a strong Indian menu to complement that, and even pinched a crack cook, Laab Singh, from the Maharaja of Patiala,” smiles Nitin.

Nonetheless, it’s still the firang food one associates the place with. Its Chicken Orientale a la Mocambo (chicken fillet cooked in wine and cream sauce with buttered rice, mushroom, fresh tomato and topped with asparagus and boiled egg) tastes just the way it used to a few decades back, the management, now running into its third generation, pledges.

Absolutely nothing has changed in 50 years, down to the original colour scheme laid out by Messerschmidt. This is repeated every time the place is repainted, and the waiters are turned out in starched white till date.

“However, we have had to relax the entry barriers a touch over the years. So you don’t need to be in a dinner jacket to pass through the main door anymore. The idea is to broadbase the magic of Mocambo,” signs off Nitin.